Keeping The Moon(18)

our parents; just because she was too principled. She wanted to prove to everyone that she could do it. That was always very

important to her.”

I thought back to the nights we’d slept in the car; to ketchup soup. To the times she’d thought I was sleeping and cried

silently, her hands over her face. My mother was strong, to be sure. But nobody was perfect.

Onscreen, my mother was leading the crowd in a touch-step, touch-step, her arms waving over her head. She had a big, bright smile,

her muscles flexing and unflexing with each lunge. “Let’s go!” she said to them, to us. “I know you can do it! I know you can!

”

Mira was watching, leaning in close. “I just love this program. The weight stuff---” she paused, shaking her head. “That’s not

important to me; we’ve always been different that way. But I just love to see what she can do. It’s infectious, you know? That’s

why I always watch,” she said softly, there in the dark, the light from the TV flickering across both of us. “I always watch.”

“Me too,” I said, and I sat on the floor by her feet. I pulled my legs in against my chest and we watched together as my mother

spread the gospel, one touch-step, touch-step at a time.





Chapter Five


The Colby post office was a tiny little house, one room lined with mailboxes, staffed by an old man who always looked half asleep.

After I worked lunches I’d leave from the back door of the restaurant, walk across an empty field, then past an auto shop and a

drugstore to come out right by its front door.

There’s a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it

when it’s about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay.

I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten.

I was in the post office picking through the mail one day-- bills, a check from Mira’s card company, and a postcard from my

mother featuring the Venus de Milo in workout wear—when I heard it.

“Well, you know what they say about her.” It was a woman’s voice, middle-aged and twangy. She was around the corner, behind the

next row of mailboxes.

“I’ve been told some things,” a second woman said. You could tell she wanted her friend to go on. She just wasn’t ready to

contribute yet.

This was also part of what I knew.

“It’s no secret,” said the first woman. I could hear her shuffling her mail. “I mean, everyone is aware of it.”

I stepped back and leaned against the mailboxes, touching my tongue to my piercing. My face was already hot, that uncontrollable

red flush that climbed across my skin, rampant, that one dry spot in the back of my throat that no amount of swallowing helped. I

might as well have been back at school, standing in the girls’ locker room listening to Caroline Dawes announce to her friends

that I’d told Chase Mercer my mother would pay him to be my boyfriend.

And that was a good day. Now here, months later in a town where I hardly knew anyone, it was happening again.

“She’s been like this ever since she moved here,” the first woman said. “But it goes beyond just personality quirks, you know?

With that bike, and the clothes she wears. Not to mention all the strays she takes in. It’s like she’s running some kind of weird

commune down at the end of that road. It’s embarrassing for all of us.”

“You’d think,” her friend said, “that someone would have told her how ridiculous she looks by now.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” the first woman said with a sigh. “But it’s no use. She’s crazy. It’s that simple.”

I took a deep breath. They weren’t talking about me; of course they weren’t. They were talking about Mira. I thought of her on

her bike, pedaling furiously, and my face began to burn again.

“Big Norm Carswell’s just beside himself that his son is living beneath her house. God knows what goes on over there. I don’t

even want to think about it.”

“Is he the football player? Or the basketball star who went to State on that scholarship?”

“Neither,” the first woman said. “He’s the youngest, Norm’s namesake. They never knew what to do with him; the boy didn’t

play anything. He has long hair and I think he’s into drugs.”

“Oh, that one. He’s actually very nice. He came to my yard sale just last week and bought up all my old sunglasses. Said he

collects them.”

“He has many problems,” said the first woman. “But then, so does Mira Sparks. I just know she’ll end up living out her days

alone, getting crazier and crazier, and fatter and fatter—” and her friend snorted once, an oh-you’re-terrible laugh—”in that

big old drafty house.”

“Oh, my,” her friend said, savoring this. “That’s so sad.”

“Well, it’s her choice.”

I already hated this woman, the way I had learned to hate anyone who talked trash behind someone’s back. I was used to the flat-